This application contains one microfiche appendix (Appendix A) containing 42 frames.
1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to creating personal autonomous avatars. In particular, the invention relates to a method and an apparatus for creating autonomous personal avatars that are attached to an electronic document.
2. Description of Related Art
Modem electronic documents, even those with hypertext capabilities, are often inferior to face-to-face communications in terms of succinctly conveying information among the author of the document and one or more readers. For example, many pages of detailed information may be required to convey a single idea that in face-to-face scenarios could be conveyed in minutes. This occurs because current electronic documents do not provide the multiple communication channels used by humans, including speech, facial expressions, gestures and speech annotation. Synthetic computer characters, such as two-dimensional animated graphical representations of humans, may be used to help remedy the disparity between the expressiveness of current electronic documents and that of human presenters. Such characters may be used by having the synthetic characters assume the metaphor of human-to-human conversation as a user interface mechanism. Current synthetic character systems fall into two broad categories: xe2x80x9cdirected charactersxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cautonomous agent charactersxe2x80x9d. Directed characters are those that are under direct and continuous user control. Examples include the various graphical chat-room environments on the Internet and motion picture and television studios specializing in motion-capture generation of cartoon characters. Autonomous agent characters are those that can act and react under their own control. That is, autonomous agent characters are not under direct control of a person. Instead, they are pre-programmed to function as a user interface to a software system.
Current systems using autonomous agent characters include Microsoft Agent (xe2x80x9cIntroduction to Microsoft Agent,xe2x80x9d at http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/prog/agentxe2x80x9d). Microsoft Agent provides a very general agent server that allows client programs to launch and control animated characters that can be commanded to execute a named animation sequence, speak a text string, move and resize. JackPresenter (xe2x80x9cA Virtual Human Presenter,xe2x80x9d Tsuhara Noma and Norman I. Badler, IJCAI, 1997) provides an anthropomorphically-correct, three-dimensional animated human that presents specific material. The PPP Persona Project (xe2x80x9cThe PPP Persona: a Multipurpose Animated Presentation Agent,xe2x80x9d Elizabeth Andre, Jochen Muller and Thomas Rist, Advance Visual Interfaces, ACM Press, 1997) uses a planning system to plan tutorial presentations as specified material given over a target time duration for the presentation. The PPP Persona system simply plans and executes a single presentation and does not support reader annotation of the document.
Another type of synthetic character is the autonomous personal representative. One role that an autonomous personal representative can perform is giving opinions of, or guided tours through, documents. The Active Task Project (xe2x80x9cActive Task Through Multimedia Documents,xe2x80x9d Polle T. Zellweger, Cambridge University Press, 1988) provides the ability to script presentations of documents or sets of documents but does not use synthetic characters in the interface.
While the above-described systems may improve the quality of communications with respect to electronic documents, they lack the capability to personalize the virtual agent. Furthermore, they do not provide tight coupling between the personal representatives and the objects within the documents.
Accordingly, this invention provides a method and system for creating autonomous personal representatives, or avatars, that can be attached to an electronic document.
The avatars are bound to documents using a mechanism that specifies, for any object on a page of the document (e.g., word, sentence, paragraph), a narrative that a given avatar can deliver regarding the annotated object, together with a reference to the definitions of the avatar and its behaviors. The avatars are initially displayed in a margin of the document until a reader interacts with the avatars by selecting them, dragging them onto the document or selecting part of the document which has one or more avatars associated with it.
The avatars change their behavior based on the reader""s actions and their current context within the document. For example, dragging the avatar over an annotated object on the document can cause the avatar to smile and raise its eyebrows. Each element of the avatar""s behavior (e.g., a narrative or elaboration of part of the document) can include synchronized animations and audio. The avatars can also interact with the document itself by, for example, selecting hypertext links in the document pages. This gives the avatars the ability to provide customized presentations, or xe2x80x9cguided toursxe2x80x9d of documents. The adaptive multi-modal, i.e., text, audio, and animation, presentation capability provided by the avatars has a number of enhancement features, including increasing the amount of information stored within a document, by offering extra information when the avatar is invoked. Thus, the avatars of this invention provide a presentation that is custom tailored to each reader""s needs. This makes the avatar system more flexible than video clips or other fixed multimedia presentations. Further, the avatar system provides the hypertext links in the document ordered into a meaningful position by the avatar, thus offering strategies for information navigation. Additionally, the extra information does not require the reader to leave the current page being viewed. The reader can continue to view the current page while being offered more information, both visually and audibly, by the avatar. Finally, when the avatar creator is also the document author, the avatar can add to the information available by providing context to the document""s construction.
Each object in a document can be annotated with multiple avatars. The avatars can represent different people or different abstractions of the materials. For example, in a collaborative work, the different abstractions could be the viewpoints of the different authors. The avatars can also be used, for example, to give technical versus managerial viewpoints, or English versus Japanese delivery. Such perspectives augment the more usual mode of writing documents and offer a complimentary and more personalized narrative viewpoint of the materials presented.
An Avatar Studio allows the avatar creator to rapidly construct avatars that reflect the avatar creator""s physical appearance by simply tracing over digital photographs, for example. Thus, the avatar can represent the likeness of a particular avatar creator to others by using the avatar creator""s recorded voice, visual likeness, physical mannerisms and personality.
These and other features and advantages of this invention are described in or are apparent from the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.